


Anima to Anima

by respoftw



Series: 2018 Hurt/Comfort Bingo [6]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Captivity, Fluff and Angst, Forced Bonding, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 16:18:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15465303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/respoftw/pseuds/respoftw
Summary: Rodney didn’t have a mark on him when they found him but that didn’t change the fact that he was dying just as surely as if he had been bleeding out in the dust of the cell the Taranians had kept him in.





	Anima to Anima

Rodney didn’t have a mark on him when they found him but that didn’t change the fact that he was dying just as surely as if he had been bleeding out in the dust of the cell the Taranians had kept him in.  

John didn’t know how he knew it but he knew he was right.  They way Ronon and Teyla froze beside him, Ronon muttering a small, heartfelt ‘fuck’ under his breath, told him that they felt it too.  There was something in the air of the underground cell, something more than the dusty staleness of poor ventilation and the innate sense of wrongness that pricked at John’s skin, causing the hairs on his arms to rise up in tiny bumps of gooseflesh. 

It was Teyla who moved first, closing the short distance between the doorway and Rodney’s huddled form, stripped naked and shivering in the corner.  She fell to her knees in front of him, her hand hovering bare inches over Rodney’s skin when a hoarse voice yelled for her to stop.

John’s P-90 swung in the direction of the voice, Ronon’s gun moving in parallel with it.  It was only at that moment that he had noticed that Rodney had a cellmate. Rodney’s cellmate was standing in the opposite corner, his hands held up in the universal gesture of surrender and John wonders what this prisoner had done to warrant clothes when Rodney had been stripped of his.  The stranger looks healthy and whole in a way that Rodney absolutely doesn’t. 

“You shouldn’t touch him,” the man continued, his eyes darting fearfully between the guns pointed at him and Teyla, who was still kneeling before Rodney, her hands frozen above him, stilled by the stranger’s words.

“Why?”  Teyla asked.  “What have they done to him?”

“Anima mea,” the man whispered.  “They...they hurt it. Tried to take it.  Almost succeeded.” 

“I do not know those words,” Teyla said, looking at John and Ronon, her hand still hovering over a senseless Rodney.

“Me neither,” Ronon said.  His gun hadn’t wavered, still pointing at the unnamed man who shared Rodney’s cell.  

John, who had dropped his P-90, letting it dangle from his vest, grimaced.  “I have,” he said. “At least, I have on Earth.” He wasn’t sure if it even meant the same thing in the Pegasus Galaxy and if it did, he had no idea what it meant in this context.  He didn’t care either. The important thing was getting Rodney out of here as quickly as possible and into the infirmary.

“Earth,”  the man repeated, his face animated in something other than fear for the first time.  He swung around to look at John, an expression of relief on his face. “You are...are you John?”

John dragged his eyes away from Rodney’s still form and looked sharply at the other man.  “I’m _Colonel_ John Sheppard,” he said. “Now, who the hell are you?” 

“He spoke about you,” the man said, ignoring John’s question.  “Sometimes your name was all he could say.” The man took a step towards John, Ronon’s pistol following his movement.  “You can touch him,” he said, indicating that John should take Teyla’s place. “Only you can heal him.”

“And why should we listen to you,” Ronon growled. 

“It doesn’t matter,” John said, drawing Ronon’s gaze.  “He isn’t moving on his own so someone needs to get him out of here and it was probably gonna be me or you anyway.”  John put on his fakest smile and his ‘play nice with the natives’ voice. “If the nice man is ok with me touching him then we’re good, right?”   _And nobody needs to get shot_ , he silently added with a pointed look at Ronon’s gun.

“Fine, but we better hurry.  Lorne and his team can’t keep them back forever.”  

Nodding in agreement, John moved towards Rodney, exchanging places with Teyla.   
  
“Hey buddy,” he said quietly, laying his jacket over Rodney’s waist to preserve his modesty. “what do you say we get you out of here, huh?”

John didn’t expect an answer but the quiet was hard to take.  Rodney’s eyes were open but unseeing, his mouth open in a silent cry of pain and John wanted to kill the Taranians all over again.

Before John had a chance to get his hand under Rodney’s shoulder to lift him, the man darted forward and grabbed John’s wrist, moving it to press John’s against Rodney’s chest.  John could hear Ronon’s gun start to charge and yelled for him to stop. 

The man paid no attention to the danger he’d just put himself in and began to chant in what sounded like Latin to John.  Like ‘anima mea’ he recognised a few of the words but he stopped listening when he felt a warm burn start to build up in his chest.  Suddenly second-guessing his order for Ronon to not shoot, John gasped as a flare of pain travelled from his chest down the length of his arm and through the hand that was still pressed against Rodney’s chest where it dissipated as quickly as it had begun.

“There,” the man said, sounding relieved but exhausted.  “Anima to anima. You can take him now.”

John’s radio chose that moment to flare to life, Lorne yelling at them to hurry.  Cursing quietly, John lifted Rodney over his shoulder, securing his jacket around him as best he could and ordered Ronon and Teyla to the jumper.  When John turned to look for the stranger, he was gone, evidently having enough sense to follow Ronon and Teyla out of the cell.

John reached the jumper last, the added weight of Rodney slowing him down.  It wasn’t until after he had secured Rodney in the back of the jumper, a warm blanket covering him, that he noticed the other prisoner wasn’t there.   
  
“We thought he was with you,” Teyla said.  “Perhaps he lost his way.”   
  
“It was a straight line from the cell to the exit,” Ronon pointed out.  “There’s no way he could have gotten lost.”   
  
“Still, perhaps we should - -“   
  
“He’s fine,” John interrupted.  “We got what we came for. It’s time to go home.”   
  
He wasn’t sure why he was so sure that the man didn’t need their help but he knew, with the same certainty that he knew Rodney had been dying when they first found him but wasn’t anymore, that the man would be fine.   
  
Maybe Teyla and Ronon knew it too because neither of them argued the point as they all buckled in and waited for Lorne to take them home.

_ Anima mea. _

John shivered suddenly.

In Latin, it meant soul.     


* * *

  
The bedside vigil was a familiar part of being part of an offworld team, especially AR-1.  John, Teyla and Ronon traded off turns in picking up food and rotated seats every couple of hours so that they all had a turn in the one comfortable seat that had somehow managed to sneak past Carson to make it into the infirmary.

The only thing different about this particular bedside vigil was that John knew exactly when Rodney was going to wake up.  He tried not to show just how very freaked out he was by the warm ball of something that seemed to have taken up residence in his ribcage close to his heart and the way it started to pulse as Rodney got closer and closer to consciousness.

Rodney’s eyes opened at the exact moment that the strange ball of something seemed to settle and John reached his freak out quotient for the day.

Using the bustling of Carson and his band of nurses as cover, he escaped the infirmary, finding solace in a random balcony in a part of Atlantis that he didn’t recognise.

_ Anima mea. _

Anima to anima. _Soul to soul._

John had a feeling that he’d done a hell of a lot more than rescue Rodney this time.

* * *

Carson held Rodney overnight but, since there wasn’t a single scratch on him, not even a mild bruise, he was forced to discharge him the next morning, albeit on restricted duty for the next week.

John knew that Rodney’s idea of restricted duty usually meant that he would be in the labs within ten minutes of Carson setting him free so he was shocked to find Rodney sitting on the floor outside of his quarters when John came back from his morning run.

“Rodney, what are you - - “

“I think we need to talk, Colonel.  Don’t you?”

John swallowed his impulse to keep running.  He didn’t think there was anywhere he could run to that would let him hide from this.

Thinking his door open, John gestured for Rodney to step inside, following after him when he did.

“You mind if I have a shower first?” he asked.

“John.”

“Look, Rodney, I know that we need to talk or whatever but - - “

“I didn’t have a cellmate,” Rodney said, talking over him.  “Teyla and Ronon told me what happened and - - the whole time I was in that cell there was nobody there but me.”

John sighed, sitting on his bed, his shoulders slumped.  

“Yeah,” he said.  “I figured you might say that.”

“So, the way I figure it, all three of you were delirious in your relief of finding me which, while understandable, doesn’t explain why you all hallucinated the same thing or - - “

“Or you have an Ancient fairy godfather looking out for you,” John finished. “Rodney, what did they - - what did they do to you?”

Rodney’s face closed off at that, a shutter of blankness masking his usually expressive face and John knew right away that it was bad.  Hell, he’d known that the minute he entered the cell but to see the hurt it had caused in the complete lack of anything on Rodney's face...killing the Taranians three times wouldn’t have been enough.

“The Ancients believed in the concept of a soul, did you know that?” Rodney asked.  “I mean, they had to, what with the whole Ascension thing. I mean, it’s a load of wishy-washy idiocy if you ask me but - -”

“Is it?” John interrupted.  “Do you really believe that?  Now?”

“The Taranians believed in it too,” Rodney said quietly.  “They wanted to study one. They had this machine and...I felt something pull inside me a little more every time they put me in it and I could feel this emptiness inside growing bigger and bigger with every session and I knew, somehow I just knew, that the moment the thing they were pulling finally snapped I would die.”

“Rodney.”  John’s voice broke suddenly.  He didn’t want to hear it, any of it.

Rodney smiled sadly.  “Funny thing is, that empty space?  It doesn’t feel empty anymore but it’s not the same as before either.  It - it feels like you.”

John breathed out, the words like a punch to the gut even if he knew they were coming.

“Anima to anima,” he muttered.  “You know, when I got an Ancient stalker the only thing she did was flirt a little.  Why couldn’t yours have done that?”

Rodney laughed a little, a little manic.  Probably relief at the fact that John hadn’t laughed him out the room.  John realised with a shock that he wasn’t just guessing on that, part of him could actually feel Rodney’s relief as acutely as he could feel his own.

Rodney’s eyes widened slightly and John could see - or feel - it was hard to describe - that Rodney was reaching the same conclusion.

“I think,” Rodney said slowly, “that my Ancient stalker knew he didn’t have a shot.  I’m kind of, ah, slightly in love with someone else.”

The strength of that ‘slightly in love’ feeling was almost enough to knock John out.  Smiling, he poured his own feelings through the soul bond to Rodney.

“Oh, we are not calling it that, Colonel.  A _soul bond_? What are you, a twelve-year-old girl?”

“Hey, Rodney?  How about you drop the Colonel?  I mean, we’re _soul bonded_ now, you should really call me John.”  John grinned as Rodney cringed at the term again. “Come on, what else should we call it?”

“We should be freaking out about it!” Rodney said, his arms waving wildly in the air.  “We don’t know anything about what this will mean for us, I mean, what happens if you get hurt?  What if _I_ get hurt?”

John shrugged.  “I have no idea.  We’ll find out soon enough.”

“Why aren’t I freaking out about this?” Rodney asked quietly, sitting on the bed next to John, close enough that their shoulders touched.

“Maybe you’ll freak out after a shower?” John suggested.

“You think?” Rodney asked hopefully.

“Only one way to find out.”  John stood up, stripped off his t-shirt and tossed it on the floor on his way to the bathroom.  Hands on his trousers, he looked over his shoulder to where Rodney sat on the bed as he started to push them down.

“Coming?”

John knew that Rodney was going to move before he even started to move.

Maybe they would freak out about this later but, right now, John was surrounded by the happy, warm feelings of the man he had loved for longer than he cared to admit.

That was enough for now.

 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This fills the forced soulbonding square of my H/C bingo card which you can see [here](https://respoftw.dreamwidth.org/19969.html#cutid1)
> 
> Please feel free to suggest which square I do next, I'm aiming for blackout!


End file.
